The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,” Andreessen says. “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

We would collect a bundle of sticks in the local wood, sell them to a neighbour for a penny, then walk two miles to to the local picture house to see Charlie [Chaplin], it was silent films in those days, talkies weren’t invented then.

With that said, Kwanzaa-hating has always struck me as the most bougie and snobbish of holiday traditions. It’s that cool that Jonathan Safran Foer thinks that “no one is quite sure what Kwanzaa is,” but I’m not sure “what Hanukkah is.” And for most of my life, no one I knew was quite sure either. I’m only barely sure “what Christmas is.” (Celebrating the birth of your savior with an orgy of consumption?) It’s just seems bizarre in America, of all places, to stand on vintage. Has there ever been a more mongrel, more made-up, country that this one? Have there ever been two more “made up people” then the “white race” and the “black race?” This country is a mongrel mess — and its traditions are, too. That’s the whole charm of the thing. No one who takes the Easter Bunny seriously should mock Kwanzaa. This is about equality. Black people have right to make shit up, just as white people have the right to make shit up.

So often when I’m out and about I find myself in desperate need of some random numbers!

An increasing number of Americans have found that when legal strictures and open discrimination are stripped away they are left not with the reprehensible, but with neighbors, friends, and family members whom they love, and see loving each other. Little wonder, then, that two-thirds of those under thirty support same-sex marriage.

[gallery]

sosuperawesome:

Off the Grid

“There are growing number of people
who have decided to live light on the earth
to not be a part of problem anymore
I spent the last few years with four of them
striving for harmony with nature
in the most pristine corners of United States.”

Eric Valli

The only people in the world who get to act like race and gender don’t matter are white men. I’m a white man myself. And let me tell you: It is amazing. No joke. And if I shave and put on a suit? You would not believe it.

In response to the specific example of Nicolala liking Walmart, Facebook insists it really did happen: “We show that the Like happened on 10/01 at 6:46 p.m.,” the spokesman says.

www.youtube.com/watch

"Every time we have intense, saturation coverage of a mass murder, we expect to see one or two more within a week" Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe 25/03/09

It’s really the first time online-native writers have been given a tool they understand how to use with a hook into the App Store’s ecosystem.

When people look us up in the App Store, we’re confident that the first 12-15 apps are going to represent us very well. Our platform is only as good as the people using it. Compared to what publishing has been going through, programming is pretty easy.

They understand that healthy publishing businesses are built from the ground up, not from ‘vast amounts of cash’ on down. There is no ‘moving into profit mode later’ for healthy publications. So 29th Street is making top-notch tools that allow publishers of ANY size to find their fit — and publishers don’t have to burn money that isn’t theirs making delivery vehicles like these.

For the last seven years, at the Metropolitan Police forensic lab in south London, audio specialists have been continuously recording the sound of mains electricity. Comparing the unique pattern of the frequencies on an audio recording with a database that has been logging these changes for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year provides a digital watermark: a date and time stamp on the recording.

shanio:

a tweet from a friend

Waiting anxiously for @shani_o’s story on the teleology of favoriting. I have a work email thread that I need to fave my way out of.

short version: we should be able to visibly fave emails so we don’t have to reply.

To be on the Newsstand you have to program an iOS app. The tech hurdle is high, and hiring isn’t cheap. iOS programmers are in extremely high demand. Now is a great time for another Movable Type. Writers would love a way to push serialized content straight to tablets, and the experience would be a boon to readers. Tablets are the best way to read, and Newsstand is the equivalent of RSS for non-geeks.

Few people know this, but Community Chest is real; there are real cards, drawn in secret by the powerful and the occult — in darkened living rooms in penthouse apartments — in small clearings near running water — behind certain colonial buildings in the coastal northeast — cards whose instructions and gifts are printed in blood and considered mystical bonds.

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors—home, car, gym, office, shops—disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.

How about I build something that buys me things completely at random? Something that just… fills my life with crap? How would these purchases make me feel? Would they actually be any less meaningful than the crap I buy myself on a regular basis anyway?

[gallery]

If Buy Nothing Day gets you down — forget about Buy Nothing Year — how about a more positive crusade: Buy More Stuff!

Previously: create something day (randomWalks, 2002)

[gallery]

"Maybe 300 or 400 years from now, everything will be gone, we’ll all be gone, and they’ll be the four faces in the Black Hills and the statue there symbolizing the Native Americans who were here at one time."

A memorial for Crazy Horse 64 years in the making … so far - CNN.com

I thought it would really be exciting and sort of progressive for a big game company like ours to [create] a minority, someone who’s an outsider, who’s pretty underrepresented in most media.

[gallery]

matthen:

Draw some random points on a piece of paper and join them up to make a random polygon. Find all the midpoints and connecting them up to give a new shape, and repeat. The resulting shape will get smaller and smaller, and will tend towards an ellipse!  [code] [more]

Maybe a hundred years down the line, nobody will look back at climate change as the most important issue of the early 21st century, because the damage will have been done, and the idea that it might have been prevented will seem absurd. Maybe the idea that Mali and Burkina Faso were once inhabited countries rather than empty deserts will seem queer, and the immiseration of huge numbers of stateless refugees thronging against the borders of the rich northern countries will be taken for granted. The absence of the polar ice cap and the submersion of Venice will have been normalised; nobody will think of these as live issues, no one will spend their time reproaching their forefathers, there’ll be no moral dimension at all. We will have wrecked the planet, but our great-grandchildren won’t care much, because they’ll have been born into a planet already wrecked.

You’re only able to get to a certain depth of creativity if you’re being constantly distracted. And I think you can cross further if you’re alone for, say, eight hours with no distraction. You can cross even deeper if you’re alone for a week. I found that it really wasn’t until about two days into any given stretch that I was able to get to a place of inspiration — that I had anything valid to say.

[gallery]

"Occupy Hanukkah" cards by zoecohen on Etsy

ALF was the minstrel it was politically correct to love even as you shrank from him. He was the camp Semite redeemed by his ability to be more clever than the goyim. His appetite for the most helpless icon of the home, the kitten, updated the blood libel to slapstick.

Enough. This is just sex. This is nothing more than the odd, notable penis or the odd, notable vagina staggering off the marked path and rubbing against the wrong tree. This is just people.

Republican strategist: “This is the last time anyone will try to do this” — “this” being a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election.

Before election night 60 years ago, the race between Stevenson and Eisenhower looked close. But early in the night, with just over 3 million votes counted, UNIVAC predicted the odds were 100 to 1 in favor of Eisenhower.

[gallery]

A single mysterious computer program that placed orders — and then subsequently canceled them — made up 4 percent of all quote traffic in the U.S. stock market last week, according to the top tracker of high-frequency trading activity. The motive of the algorithm is still unclear.

For such a critical app, there’s really very little that’s being done to innovate on the experience. It doesn’t wake me up to my favorite song. It doesn’t let me decide how long I want to snooze between alarms. It doesn’t check my calendar automatically and set an alarm based on what my day looks like. It doesn’t give me the weather forecast for the day when I wake up.

For instance, my mother is 89-and-a-half years old. She lives in Northeast Philadelphia and reads the Inquirer every day. She doesn’t own a computer. Her knowledge of computers, I would say, is minuscule. If there were no Inquirer in print, she would have to buy a computer, and at the age of almost 90, master new technology, or go to the Daily News, or stop reading.

The long-awaited results of a study in which patients were given complete access to their doctors’ notes do more than shed light on what patients want. They make our current ideas about transparency in the patient-doctor relationship a quaint artifact of the past. … All three hospitals in the study are working to allow those patients who participated to continue to have access to their doctors’ notes.

To which Big Bird interjects: “That’s not fair!” I am absolutely not fucking kidding. This is the part of the program where Big Bird defies a god and argues justice for the tormented soul of his little buddy.

If it actually were my friend, a large, online book retailer might say, ‘Look, you’ve been spending too much money on books recently. Don’t you think you should get out a bit more, and not sit there buying stuff?’

Not content with being merely evil, criminal, and spammy, they now seek to be outright creepy and repulsive.

When the company that bought the brand itself went out of business in 2001, Peterman bought the name back with the help of John O’Hurley, the actor who played J. Peterman on “Seinfeld.”

Facebook can now tell if you’ve purchased a product that was advertised to you on Facebook.

Those killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan are more or less automatically deemed “militants” by unnamed “officials”, and then uncritically called such by most of the western press – a practice that inexcusably continues despite revelations that the Obama administration has redefined “militants” to mean “all military-age males in a strike zone”.

Given a chance to be free of modern life, the body would naturally settle into a split sleep schedule.

Semi-autonomous flying things are already available to the public and will continue to become more available. Yet our intuitive privacy settings, our security forces, and our sense of property all assume humans on the ground. Let me posit this: Drones will make traditional fences as obsolete as gunpowder and cannons made city walls.

[gallery]

Every opportunity to relate one part of the puzzle to another part of the puzzle is taken; no part of the puzzle is wasted. When designed well, this kind of puzzle means endless surprise, solving it means delving deeper and deeper; you become faimilar with every letter, every picture, every clue. It’s not just that it could be important—eventually it will be important. And by the time you’re finished, you know the puzzle better than you thought you ever could, and you rarely forget any part of it.

Tony Delgado: The Fool’s Errand

You must understand that haters have constructed an alternate reality around themselves, one where shitting on a perfect jewel is the equivalent of enlightenment. If you feel frustrated dealing with them, just imagine what it’s like inside their own heads!

[gallery]

i12bent:

Robert Gibbons: On the Autumnal Equinox, 2012

I walk alone a lot, but not today, what with it being the last day of summer, & seriously, the earth & nature know this, the mind of earth & nature very palpable at Times like these Equinoxes & Solstices, where slender wheatgrass waves goodbye, New England asters emerge to say hello, the entire ground becomes animated, & stones one’s stared at before suddenly take on a new life of their own, tossing several glances (Pound’s phanopoeia) as unheard words in order to enhance, give wealth to our poor existences, & their own.

Some few, some very few, there are, who try the key of love in all life’s doors. Radiant, they turn to the men and women about and cry, “Try love! It unlocks all other doors as surely as it does the first in life. Try love!”

One irony of Mitt Romney’s leaked criticism of the 47% of Americans who don’t pay income tax is that Romney may be a member of the club himself since he pays almost no income tax relative to his vast wealth.

As long as the veg*n narrative is taken seriously, and we double-down on agriculture as a solution to the problem of overpopulation that it is the very cause of, we simply increase the human suffering that the failure of agriculture is inevitably hurtling toward.

Walking upright has a price in back problems. The capacity for tissue repair has a price of cancer. The immune response has a price of immune disorders. The price of anxiety is panic disorder. In each case, natural selection has done the best it can, weighing benefits against costs. Wherever the balance point, however, there will be disease.

"Generous" is the first word that comes to mind. Generous with his time, contacts, stuff and money. Maybe a little too generous sometimes with money—some people took advantage. Extraordinarily energetic; he wouldn’t stop working even when doctors told him to slow down. Meticulous in his research on causes. Sometimes he acted like a spoiled child, and I did see him stamp his feet and jump up and down on occasion.

[gallery]

(via Bad Children’s Books — BobStaake.com)

[gallery]

monkeyajb:

Important Observations

Turn right onto E Main St and then walk toward the heart of the city. If the city has no heart, give it one.

[gallery]

Hooray! What was once a Walmart has become a 124,500 square foot public library.

Most people’s first mistake when walking is to know where they already are. Street names and recognisable sites should be avoided like the weekly chart countdown. If you know where you are, you cannot get lost. If you cannot get lost then you will constantly be distracted by things you have have already seen.

We don’t yet have the history of who was the Afrika Bambaataa of blogging. If there was a Sugar Hill Gang, if there was a “Planet Rock” of blogs, that was the stuff that I was around, and got to see. You were aware of it, you were like, this is going to win. This is going to take over the world.

[gallery]

"Like full-spectrum hieroglyphs, these spray-painted dots are ‘infrastructural forensic evidence,’ in Foster’s words, marking the ritualistic elimination of insects from urban space." (via BLDGBLOG: Dot Urbanism)

Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution has been confirmed beyond any doubt, and is the foundation for a new and rapidly expanding field of precise science with profound potential benefits to human health.

[gallery]

Nipplegate (The New Yorker)

Public Telephone
Write down the number. Stand nearby and call it. Gesture excitedly and encourage a passerby to answer. When they do, ask them where they are, and ask them what the weather is like.

Getting lost means that between us and space there is not only a relationship of dominion, of control on the part of the subject, but also the possibility that space can dominate us. There are moments in life in which we learn how to learn from the space around us. […] We are no longer capable of giving a value, a meaning to the possibility of getting lost. To change places, to come to terms with different worlds, to be forced to continuously recreate our points of reference, is regenerating at a psychic level, but today no one would recommend such an experience. In primitive cultures, on the other hand, if someone never gets lost he never grows up. And this is done in the desert, the forest, places that are a sort of machine through which to attain other states of consciousness.

We felt as if we were moving in a strange new zone exactly halfway between randomness and order. No one could predict where the left-and-right pattern would take us, yet we weren’t wandering. The firm logic of the algorithm was constantly taking us away from the directions and destinations our whims might have chosen.

i12bent:

Sol LeWitt: Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969)

1. Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
2. Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.
3. Illogical judgements lead to new experience.
4. Formal Art is essentially rational.
5. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
6. If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.
7. The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His wilfulness may only be ego.
8. When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.
9. The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter are the components. Ideas implement the concept.
10. Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.
11. Ideas do not necessarily proceed in logical order. They may set one off in unexpected directions but an idea must necessarily be completed in the mind before the next one is formed.
12. For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not.
13. A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist’s mind to the viewer’s. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist’s mind.
14. The words of one artist to another may induce an idea’s chain, if they share the same concept.
15. Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, the artist may use any form, from an expression of words (written or spoken) to physical reality, equally.
16. If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature, numbers are not mathematics.
17. AH ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art.
18. One usually understands the art of the past by applying the conventions of the present thus misunderstanding the art of the past.
19. The conventions of art are altered by works of art.
20. Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions.
21. Perception of ideas leads to new ideas.
22. The artist cannot imagine his art, and cannot perceive it until it is complete.
23. One artist may mis-perceive (understand it differently than the artist) a work of art but still be set off in his own chain of thought by that misconstrual.
24. Perception is subjective.
25. The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others.
26. An artist may perceive the art of others better than his own.
27. The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made.
28. Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side-effects that the artist can¬not imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.
29. The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.
30. There are many elements involved in a work of art. The most important are the most obvious.
31. If an artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist’s concept involved the material.
32. Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.
33. It is difficult to bungle a good idea.
34. When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art.
35. These sentences comment on art, but are not art.

(Image - poster by Angela Ferrara)

[gallery]

Michal Migurski: generating repeating patterns

Keep in mind people use social tools very differently. What has worked for the very early innovators through early adopters is extremely different from the different personality types that will follow. This gap in understanding that the world is not like us has not become real to many building social tools.

The city is a behavioral device. Its shapes and systems alter how we feel, how we see each other, and how we act. This would be a terrible thought if it were not for a second truth, which is that the city is malleable. We can change it whenever we wish.

I wanted to be able to have it as a very collaborative play space, and still the web hasn’t fully provided what I wanted then in terms of being a really powerful collaborative medium.

[gallery]

monkeyajb:

This is a great meme.

Oh this is glorious.

This is straight-up blogging, amateur prose written quickly and with neither guiding stricture nor sober editing. I am going to tell it like it is, right from the heart, and I am going to tell it about telephone dials, because a man has to live by a code, and my code is unary loop disconnect dialing.

Peel your potatoes. All the antinutrients (defenses plants evolved to keep critters from destroying the tubers) are contained in the skin. This is exactly the opposite of what our parents told us! Like it or not, all the good stuff is NOT in the skin.

[gallery]

So um this is easily the most incredible tarot deck I’ve ever seen (via HEXEN 2.0) More on artist Suzanne Treister in this Metafilter thread.

I think the next 10 years are going to be a really interesting time where Twitter and a couple other services connect people all over the world in new ways and surprising things happen that we can’t even imagine right now. I am long on Twitter.

[gallery]

Paul Benedict (via Actor, South Philly native Sherman Hemsley dies — NewsWorks)

RIP Sherman Hemsley (and dig the psychedelic life he led) but it is blowing my mind that this wacky white next-door neighbor from The Jeffersons was also The Number Painter from Sesame Street.

[gallery]

(via Is non-celiac wheat sensitivity real? A new study says yes. | Melissa McEwen on food anthropology, economics, and culture)

Homo sapiens have walked the Earth for at least 130,000 years and, in this time, they learned to be human from their elders, not from their peers. Mandatory education in the U.S. is less than 150 years old. Learning to be a productive adult human by spending a third of every day with other kids might be a good idea, but it’s too soon to tell. I’m still unsure that the people best equipped to teach a 14-year-old boy how to be a man are other 14-year-old boys.

the pre-credit card internet was what facebook’s wildest peyote-sweat fever dreams can only ever hint at and it’s always just waiting for us

— sega juice (@dry_hugs) August 9, 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfRWA_FukXg

monkeyajb:

Souls of Mischief - Cab Fare (by Perthx)

I can’t believe I’ve never heard this song before, I guess it isn’t on any SoM regular releases, but it is sooooooo good and that Bob James sample is gold, I can’t believe no one has ever sampled this before?

Also! This isn’t even a Domino joint, it’s produced by Adam/A-Plus which makes it even better.

EDIT: Apparently this was never released because Paramount (which owns the rights, from Taxi) won’t ever clear it, so duh. Hear the original Bob James “Angela” here.

One of my top ten hip hop songs.

You try and treat it as a journey or a pilgrimage of self-discovery where you try to improve yourself as a person and overcome your doubts and negativity.

[gallery]

Microsoft Olympic Decathlon for Apple II

[gallery]

"I think it’s about a car. A car that goes to Mexico, Indonesia and other places. It’s about a car that goes on all sorts of adventures. The guy on the cover is a teen, he likes to drive people places a lot. And he’s French." (via My 6-year-old Judges Books by the Covers, from No Exit to 50 Shades of Grey - Strollerderby)

While eating, defecating, or resting in our beds, we are rubbing on our glowing rectangles, seemingly lost within the infostream.

I think it’s better for journalists to be much more transparent about where we stand. … Here’s my question to journalists everywhere—in a country that’s going to get gayer, browner, more Asian, more women in power, how are we going to accurately reflect the different realities that are out there?

Suppose a major party candidate for president believed we were in a “post-truth” era and actually campaigned that way: Would political reporters in the mainstream press figure it out and tell us?

[gallery]

monkeyajb:

Is that Malik B. just to the left of Black Thought’s mic hand?

loladelphia:

Twenty years ago today, one of Philly’s greatest musical acts, The Roots did their first performance at South Street and Passyunk Avenue.

Many albums later, The Roots continue to represent the Philadelphia music scene with class and dignity. We’re big fans of The Roots here, and we’re much looking forward to the upcoming Roots mural on 6th and South!

To the engineers at Delany, the regulation ergonomic stance of the pisser is to look ahead, not look down and wonder what “Turn To Silence” means.

[gallery]

Sunday Minecraft by Nick Ladd.

[gallery]

myserendipities:

"The first-ever snapshot of a single atom’s shadow."

Wait, you guys practice tracking enemies by using civilian cars?

When I write about ‘Drones over Brooklyn,’ it’s not like I’m making something up. Drones are policing American cities. I’m not a ‘dystopian, futuristic master,’ I’m a schnook walking the street. It’s an insane reality we’re living in, and I’m just trying to translate it for myself.

A decade of growth and exciting ideas inspired by democratization of content has metastasized in websites that put out self-conscious, largely contrived, meta content—what writers think they are supposed to produce. This plateau is extended and populated by a wave of writers who, frankly, don’t have much to offer: not original voices, not fresh ideas, not diversity of experience.

[gallery]

I love this picture of an American family. The story is just a little heartbreaking: Akron restaurant owner dies hours after meeting Obama

Our idols have aged and proven human. They have turned into yuppies like us who smoke weed only occasionally and in comfortable living rooms with Persian rugs and who have kids who play soccer, and that’s okay.

You fulfill hip-hop’s early promise to not give a fuck about what others think of you.

[gallery]

The San Diego fireworks all went off at once this year. more

Today is a big day for hip-hop. It is a day that will define who we really are. How compassionate will we be? How loving can we be? How inclusive are we?

Millions of middle-class Americans are now receiving unemployment benefits, and many find themselves compelled by the meagerness of the assistance to shun opportunity and forgo productivity in favor of a ceaseless focus on daily survival. The system’s incoherence and contempt for its dependents fluoresce brilliantly in the wake of a historic event like the Great Recession. When floodwaters cover our homes, we expect that FEMA workers with emergency checks and blankets will find us. There is no moral or substantive difference between a hundred-year flood and the near-destruction of the global financial system by speculators immune from consequence. But if you and your spouse both lose your jobs and assets because of an unprecedented economic cataclysm having nothing to do with you, you quickly discover that your society expects you and your children to live malnourished on the streets indefinitely.

Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie.

It doesn’t change who I am, I’m still the same person. I’m honest, I’ve always worked hard and I’ll work hard for you.

I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion.

America’s biggest banks ripped off the entire country, virtually every day, for more than a decade!… Get busted for welfare fraud even once in America, and good luck getting so much as a food stamp ever again. Get caught rigging interest rates in 50 states, and the government goes right on handing you billions of dollars in public contracts.

Design & user experience are not the only vectors on which those decisions are made.

Lots of people talk about their standing desks with some degree of bravado. That is entirely unjustified; outside of office workers, a large portion of the workforce spends most of every day standing and working. It’s the traditional sitting office worker who is doing something unusual.

These shots are great. Your skin tones on Caucasians are perfect. Question: How’s the skin tone color on people of color ranging from Asian to African Americans, etc.?

Have your friends direct your movies and they’ll turn out better.

Lisa Herlihy, 45, said she was uncomfortable with the individual mandate upheld in the Supreme Court ruling. “I don’t think it’s right,” Ms. Herlihy said as she took a smoking break from her job in the Cobra department at a third-party insurance administrator here.

It may sound crazy and anti-capitalist to consider healthcare for all, but if we flipped a switch tomorrow and everyone had health coverage I swear a million small businesses would launch overnight.

A show that’s 100 percent reruns doesn’t fit with our mission as public broadcasters. I don’t think it’s justifiable.

This is the hidden truth: black people dominate Twitter.  The trending topics, the amount of mobile penetration of devices…study after study continues to prove that Twitter is disproportionately black. 

The daily repetition of chores once associated with survival has now been fully recast as a series of almost spiritual rituals intended to reconnect the camper with what has been largely lost; for by now most of the old necessities — hiking to and clearing the site, hunting for game, collecting water and firewood — have given way to such less arduous activities as parking the car, pitching cable-free pop tents, buying cold cuts at the campground store, hooking up electrical and sewerage conduits, setting up patio chairs, etc.

I was wolfbackriding while shooting white doves with fire when I got the email from Visitsweden.

I have been using the internet for TWENTY years! Like some hipster who has been following a band for years I spent 10 of those years not shutting up about the internet, and then the second 10 years wishing everyone would get off my internet.

[gallery]

jimn:

How is this considered OK but Milli Vanilli were fake (for doing what every pop act did & does)?  

[gallery]

One of 26 photos in ISS Star Trails by NASA_JSC_Photo

I had never been able to find a clear way to say “it’s over” until now. Last week, I broke up from my long term girlfriend simply by using the “unpair” button. Alas, it saved a lot of pain and “talking,” since we conducted our entire relationship on pair since we had moved. It’s like we never even met — easy and painless.

But let’s face it — most of us know in our hearts that eschewing a breakfast of whole grains and fruit crowned with a dab of yogurt for a greasy pile of sausage, bacon, and eggs is not the road to health.

I try not to make it be about me, but as with all evangelizers, something transforms you and changes your life—you see people saying things that are dangerous, and it’s hard not to speak up.

[gallery]

(via The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains (part I) | Empirical Zeal)

It took me 10 years to figure out that I have a large karmic debt to pay for the number of Cokes I sold across this country. … It’s shocking to me now. But it was not shocking to me then in any way, shape or form. … We were really uninformed relative to the health issues.

There is a large portion of the population that relies on the carbohydrates and energy in our regular beverages. When my son gets home from school, he needs a pick-up with calories and great taste.

Increasingly I find myself purchasing from the food underground, tiny businesses that could never find their way through the monolith of regulations. They are foods, god forbid, cooked in people’s kitchens. You know, kind of like the food mom made, but for some reason it’s OK if mom does it, but not OK to sell it to other people.

This is by far my favorite book of the series, which makes no sense because it is the most boring and nothing happens in it. But there’s a scene at the beginning, when the Ingalls family moves into their fiftieth new house, and comes across all of the cool odds and ends left over by the last tenants that reminds me so much of my favorite dream ever, in which I am roaming around a house filled with all of these endless rooms of marvelous and amazing stuff, that I couldn’t help loving it despite its boringness.

I’m not going to put anything in my body that was not here before the Europeans arrived, because there is something wrong here. Ever since colonization, my people went from being a fit, athletic race of people to the most sickly and lame.

The absence of human placentophagy, the maternal consumption of the afterbirth, is puzzling given its ubiquity and probable adaptive value in other mammals. We propose that human fire use may have led to placentophagy avoidance in our species. In our environment of evolutionary adaptedness, gravid women would likely have been regularly exposed to smoke and ash, which is known to contain harmful substances. Because the placenta filters some toxicants which then accumulate there across pregnancy, maternal placentophagy may have had deleterious consequences for the overall fitness of mother, offspring, or both, leading to its elimination from our species’ behavioral repertoire.

[gallery]

(via Mind-Blowing Shadow Art by Kumi Yamashita)

Liberal democracy—based on commitment to individual liberty and dignity—does not exist if the government legislates against particular bodies in public spaces, as it did during Jim Crow, or when it is complicit in the violent policing of those bodies by other citizens, as in the Trayvon Martin slaying. For more than two years, vocal pockets of conservative activists and politicians demanded proof of President Obama’s citizenship—as if a black man was trespassing simply by being elected to the Oval Office. As the president was being asked to show his papers to the nation, state governments in Arizona, Alabama and South Carolina empowered police officers, school officials and merchants to demand proof of citizenship from anyone they deemed suspicious of immigration violations—suspicions that are triggered primarily by racial, ethnic and linguistic profiling. Despite the dramatic legal changes brought about by the ending of Jim Crow, it is once again socially, politically and legally acceptable to presume the guilt of nonwhite bodies.

Unfortunately, “inadequate citizen rule” or “doubts about corporate governance” are not among the choices. From the available list, I went with “I don’t feel safe on Facebook.”

They’re fucking gross, man. Look, I love beautiful girls too. I think everyone should be free to have their knee socks and their sweaty shorts, but I’m over it. I’m over this weird, exhausted girl. I’m over the girl that’s tired and freezing and hungry. I like bossy girls, I always have. I like people filled with life. I’m over this weird media thing with all this, like, hollow-eyed, empty, party crap.

vimeo.com/42420343

jsmooth995:

DON’T FREAK OUT ABOUT THE WHITE BABIES.

I would predict the first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that’s hovering over his house is gonna be a folk hero in this country.

We have a game that you play once, on a randomly assigned difficulty setting, where you initially spawn in some random location (and may legally be prevented from leaving that location), where your long-term stats depend heavily on both the stats given to you by your parent gamers and by their treatment of you early in life. Every one of these factors is out of your control, and heavily influences how successful you’ll be in the game. What can be done, both as an individual player and as a collective of players, to give as many people as possible a satisfying gaming experience?

We need to work toward flooding the market—even if for the moment merely the intellectual market—with a mass of desires whose realization is not beyond the capacity of man’s present means of action on the material world, but only beyond the capacity of the old social organization.

My son will be three-years-old next month and is still breastfeeding. In other words, he is a typical primate.

My cavorting is part of my work.

It’s true that you have a higher chance of getting sick from drinking raw milk than pasteurized milk. You have a 0.00011 percent chance of getting sick from drinking pasteurized milk, and a 9.4 times greater risk of getting sick from drinking raw milk. We’re still talking about a miniscule risk of 0.00106% (one one-thousandth of a percent) .

If you feel the photograph is vaguely sexual — and I think many do, whether they’re willing to admit it or not — you’re dead wrong. If you extract the misguided sense that the kid is old enough to enjoy a breast as if it were a boob, suddenly all those unexplainable feelings about it being wrong or gross float out into the ether where they belong.

a.gb.static.cf.boldernet.net/mplayer/p…

Stephen Jepson: Never Leave the Playground

“Be Not Content is a coming-of-age novel set in San Jose, California in the early Sixties—describing William Craddock’s experiences as a young acidhead. This is a hip, profound, and wonderfully-written book, a unique chronicle of the earliest days of the great psychedelic upheaval. Be Not Content is filled with warmth and empathy, tragic at times, and very funny in spots, a wastrel masterpiece where laughter plays counterpoint against the oboes of doom. A mystical underground masterpiece that’s been unobtainable for years.”

UNTIL NOW! Rudy Rucker’s Transreal Books has released Be Not Content as an ebook.

My most painful memory, aside from every time I ever hurt you, is of letting go of my used copy of this book. I had a hunch it was an important book but otherwise I didn’t know anything about it.

Now I will finally read it.

I am at Dell’s big summit with Michael Dell in Copenhagen. Here we learn how to say “shut up bitch” and that women don’t belong in tech.

A fast-spreading plague of “super weeds” taking over U.S. farmland will not be stopped easily, and farmers and government officials need to change existing practices if food production is to be protected, industry experts said on Thursday.

Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, ‘Dear Jim: I loved your card’. Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, ‘Jim loved your card so much he ate it’… That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it

[gallery]

(via PAPERMAG - RIP Maurice Sendak: A Look Back At His Illustrations That Scared Us Most)

Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation. And yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us — the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary — we are led by the least among us — and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

is this all what it lead up to? come out the gate rowdy and fightin’….and then gain spiritual enlightenment down the line? the same guy who had “twin sisters in the bed” was now offering women (wives, mothers, & sisters) love and respect to the end.

I drove a lot of famous musicians and speakers to & from the Cleveland airport over my college career, but I literally lost my head driving Adam Yauch down 480 back to Oberlin.

Damn, man. It’s well after 2am in somebody’s living room on a warm spring evening in 1995, and there’s a beer in my hand and a joint’s just coming around again, and that swirling sound in the mix at 2:45 of “Something’s Got To Give” (right after Yauch gleefully takes a sledgehammer to a handgun in the video) sounds like a helicopter taking off, bound for some funkier and more peaceful universe. And for a blissful half a minute, I’m on it. Feel like I just switched from one chapter in life to another here. This isn’t Cobain’s suicide, this is the grim hammer of inevitable mortality or something. Damn.

Next time you get a Lionel Richie record instead of ours, keep it. He’s the shit.

What is being proposed, in effect, is ‘charterizing’ the whole district, when there is a lot of evidence that at best [charters] have no positive effect on student achievement, and there is a lot of evidence they cost more. Charters in many instances, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, have served private interests — sometimes of public officials.

[gallery]

I like taking a thing that everyone is used to and making them see it again.

(via Million Dollar Babies - The Morning News)

There is in fact no distinction between the fate of the land and the fate of the people. When one is abused, the other suffers. The penalties may come quickly to a farmer who destroys perennial cover on a sloping field. They will come sooner or later to a land-destroying civilization such as ours.

I can’t imagine I have to explain this to anyone in 2012, but if you find yourself putting brown makeup on a white person in 2012 so they can do a bad “funny” accent in order to sell potato chips, you are on the wrong course. Make some different decisions.

What really strikes me about this whole NYtimes exercise is how shitty it is. It effectively ignores decades and decades of academic debate on the subject. The fact that they included an essay on lab-grown meat, which doesn’t even address the philosophy or ethics of it at all, and is scientifically dishonest, really reveals that the Nytimes doesn’t know how to curate quality anymore.

A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and sounds of this era: Michelle’s upper arms, the baritone crooning sound of NPR, people sipping lattes (which a later decade will know as poison) at 10 A.M.—manners as strange and beautiful as smoking in restaurants and drinking Scotch at 3 P.M. seem to us.

Animals in nature move nutrients uphill, against the natural gravitational flow from high ground to low ground. This is why low lands and valleys are fertile and the uplands are less so. Animals are the only mechanism nature has to defy this natural downward flow. Fortunately, predators make the prey animals want to lounge on high ground (where they can see their enemies), which ensures that manure will concentrate on high look-out spots rather than in the valleys.

Researchers found that most feather-meal samples contained caffeine. It turns out that chickens are sometimes fed coffee pulp and green tea powder to keep them awake so that they can spend more time eating.

Since Carter, the man he shot dead on 34th Street and 5th Avenue, was a negro, Plitt was at first not held. But he is now in custody.

— Teju Cole (@tejucole) April 3, 2012

That’s from April 2 1912. History’s laughing so hard at us, its sides hurt.

— Teju Cole (@tejucole) April 3, 2012

The disastrous thing about advertising on the internet is that you know which ads work and how well, and you know what content gets the most hits. This creates a race to the bottom which is inimical to creativity and cool.

Often times, a writer uses tricks and exaggerations to convey to a reader the spirit — if not the precise truth — of what occurred. I just want to make clear that when I say that one of my friends was actually on the verge of tears, you understand that this is not such a trick. She was horrified to the point of crying.

I ate the vomlet!" he yelled. "I made other pledges eat it! That’s brotherhood!

[gallery]

"What you’re looking at is the simplest thing in the world: an oyster shell filled with olive oil and balanced in a small dish of sand. Three pieces of cotton string are lying in the oil with their ends poking just a little way off the side of the shell. Those are the wicks. This is a shell lamp. This is perhaps what the first lamp ever looked like. At the very least, this is a fundamental human technology." (via Root Simple: The World’s First Lamp)

Now you’re talking. I think a lot about Serena. I do. I collect photos of Serena. She’s just a total, super-Amazon. What more can you say? Of course, she’s also a Jehovah’s Witness. Yeah, people have said to me, ‘Hey, I can arrange for you to meet Serena.’ But I have nothing to say to her. I’m not interested in tennis, and I can’t really abide that Jehovah’s Witness nonsense. You know, there’d be no grounds for anything to talk about. So I just have to admire her from a distance. But God, what a butt, as you well know.

These people are MAD that the girl that they cried over while reading the book was “some black girl” all along.

He didn’t just retweet content without comment but vetted it, asking for confirmation, sourcing, more details, playing his followers against each other as if he were an assigning editor of an incorporeal newsroom. He became a dogged beat reporter, far removed from the scene but covering it at all hours, exposing his messy and complicated process for all to see.

All this emphasis on clothing as a motive for murder is just a smokescreen for sidestepping the real issue, which is that bigots shouldn’t be allowed to have hand guns. In fact, since you can’t hunt deer with a hand gun and most owners of a hand gun are not reservists in the National Guard of their state, it is unclear why the US tolerates so many hand guns. In countries like Britain, which do not, the murder rate by gun is vanishingly small compared to the annual carnage in the US.

Publishing for mobile demands new tools and processes. As with zines and blogs, lowering the barrier to entry will encourage new authors and forms to flourish without losing the open ethos that is central to the spirit of the Web.

It really is true that the American government and its media jointly terrorize the American people far more than the actual so-called “Terrorists” could even dream of achieving.

I wonder if doctors are losing their legitimacy now in a way similar to the other authority figures in our culture: the political leaders, the bankers economists, the business executives.

[gallery]

(via All Major News Outlets Cover Trayvon Martin Tragedy, Except Fox News | ThinkProgress)

www.youtube.com/watch

monkeyajb:

If you love hip-hop, or even are interested in music history, find some time to watch this great documentary. This is the Life - How The West Was Won is about The Good Life which was the legendary cafe where so many LA rappers got their start in the 90’s. Most folks know about Freestyle Fellowship and Project Blowed and some of the folks who went on to mass commercial success, but you can see so much more of what was happening in this documentary.

Medusa and SIN. Fat Joe getting booed off the stage. Ganja K. Cut Chemist. 2Mex. Charli 2Na. Amazing, magical stuff happening in a tiny little grocery store in South Central.

(Aceyalone is in my top 5 best emcees of all time, and he isn’t in this very much, but there are some scenes of him freestyling in the parking lot that are pretty amazing.)

Most of the conversation that once took place daily on blogs now takes place on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. To try and fight that trend is a losing proposition. Almost all prominent blogs are now corporatized with actual budgets, so continuing to play in that shrinking sandbox doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, ‘social isn’t a product,’ she told me after I gave her a demo, ‘social is people and the people are on Facebook.’

Much of the history of Black people, particularly our intimate history as shown in The Black Vernacular, is still unseen and unexplored.

Most of our competitors are interesting in doing something different, or want to appear new — I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better.

The results speak for themselves. My students not only understand Hamlet, they love it. They talk about it in the hall, and other teachers ask me about what’s happening on Twitter. My quiz grades have been higher than any in the past twelve years of teaching this piece.

Seeds that might not even be marketable now, 100 years from now might be the ace in the hole we need to figure out some kind of climatic conditions we can’t even perceive right now.

In case you missed it, the Attorney General of the United States spent a little time yesterday discussing the circumstances under which the President could order your death without having a trial or even having charged you with any crime.

What we’ve seen documented through more than fifty years of experimentation in New York City is that we cannot effectively create public spaces in places that are owned by a company. Yet, we’re increasingly ceding our public discourse to platforms and services which exactly mimic the traits of our sterile captive atria in the physical world.

[gallery]

[gallery]

jayrosen:

Actually Governor Romney, what you just said is completely incorrect… This is NPR.

NPR has a new ethics handbook, which came out February 24th. Here’s the key part:

We report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports.

Fair to the truth. It’s already started to have an effect. This is from an NPR report on Feb. 27 about the auto bailouts and the Republican candidates.

NPR REPORTER: Mitt Romney, son of former American Motors CEO George Romney, criticized President Barack Obama’s handling of the bailout.

MITT ROMNEY: Instead of going through the normal managed bankruptcy process, he made sure the bankruptcy process ended up with the UAW taking the lion’s share of the equity in the business.

NPR REPORTER: Actually, the U.S. Treasury got most of GM’s equity. 

Such a simple word: “Actually….” And now it has a chance to become standard practice at NPR.

For more on this, see my post: NPR Tries to Get its Pressthink Right

(Photo by Matthew Reichbach. Creative Commons License.)

There is a counterpart to you in China who is looking at the iPhone and approving of the fact that its hardware is made in China, but disapproving of the fact that its software is made in California, where there is a racist government, hundreds of thousands of innocent people in jail, and where people die routinely because they don’t have basic medical care. Too bad for that guy also. He has no control over California, its laws, or its problems, in the exact same way that you have no control over China, its laws, or its problems. Same for Tim Cook. He has a lot of corporate power, but it is still illegal for him to get married in California in spite of all that. He can’t wave a magic wand and fix California, let alone fix China. It is a fact of life that a modern computing device will have software from Silicon Valley and hardware from Shenzhen because those are the places where software and hardware are made.

…It was the first time I ever felt like a non-outsider in my own country and where my race was never a consideration to who I was as a person. It dawned on me that this is what white people must get to feel like all the time. It’s not a bad feeling. I highly recommend it!!! A+++

[gallery]

(Beautiful Mosaics of Trees Photographed Across Time via PetaPixel as promised)

Safari users with the browser set to block third-party cookies thought they were not being tracked. Nonetheless, DoubleClick was able to set tracking cookies in an obvious violation of the set preference.

[gallery]

(via Inside and on Top of the Divine Lorraine with Lies and Get Up « Streets Dept)

I was not dressed like a parking valet; I was wearing a suit coat and a nice shirt and carrying my own laptop bag. And I wasn’t standing behind the valet stand. But that white lady was not getting served fast enough. She just looked for the first available brown person.

I don’t really think anything Microsoft does puts pressure on Apple.

Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own.

Usually, a breakthrough that can radically improve national health and has strong biomechanical science behind it is welcomed as “promising” and “exciting.” So why is running form different? Because if you strip Lieberman’s work down to raw essentials, you come up with a single hard truth: cushioned running shoes are a fraud. They don’t help, they probably hurt, and the billions of dollars that are made every year by selling and promoting them are cashing in on your pain. With that mountain of money at stake, a tremendous amount of effort has been made to create the false impression that cushioned shoes are a safety item, like bike helmets and seat belts. It’s not easy to reverse a misconception like that, especially when it’s such a cash machine for everyone who makes, sells, and “reviews” running shoes.

Ugh, just when I venture to pay some attention to Dave Winer, he chooses to bring the sexism back. Forget it.

“I work in an I.T recycle center. We have stacks of abandoned Apple G5 Macs” - Ian Lee

[gallery]

"Here is Lincoln as he was, his eyes weary, his forehead wrinkled, wearing an expression, wrote a poet, of ‘deep latent sadness.’ But Gardner also captures something else. An eyebrow, arched. An upturned lip. The faintest hint of a smile." (BARACK OBAMA, Perfecting Our Union via The Atlantic)

Nobody wants to think about the poet at the water cooler, or, even worse, pouring over actuarial tables.

I do not agree that I, the consumer am responsible for creating the working conditions in Chinese factories simply because I decide to purchase a product that happens to be made in China.

These articles get the neighborhood’s evolution precisely backwards. Park Slope was initially gentrified in the 1970s and ’80s by families like mine that moved there for more space than they could afford in Manhattan or Brooklyn Heights, often to raise children. There were stores selling toys and books for children and babies long before there were trendy bars, clubs or restaurants.

[gallery]

Art History Through Sci Fi-Colored Glasses | Tor.com via djacobs’ shk

I’d like to raise both of my middle fingers to him and anyone who thinks profanity is somehow more harmful to our children than images of violence and misogyny.

I was living in South Slope four years ago, and it was already known as the stroller district.

I cannot figure this out, though: WHAT ARE THOSE OTHER YELLOW CREATURES IN THE FIELD WITH THE COW????

What’s the right way to protest TODAY?

1. Don’t delete your Facebook account. Deleting your account just makes you look like a weirdo in today’s world. Dave Winer has that luxury, but most of us don’t.
2. Make ALL data on your Facebook account PUBLIC. Most technologists have done the opposite. To the point where if you aren’t friends with most geeks you can’t even see ANYTHING on their account. That isn’t helping the commons.
3. Work to figure out how to get our data OUT of Facebook, Google , and Amazon and back into the commons.

People who argue that it’s a realistic movie are incorrect: the men of Jackson, Miss., would have killed several of these maids. The happy ending we get — Viola Davis’ Aibileen walking home unharmed as the screen fades to black — is fraudulent and so surreally absurd as to be Dalí-esque.

[gallery]

occupyposters:

I’ve submitted one of my Occupy Wall Street posters to Threadless. Would you give it a vote? http://www.threadless.com/submission/397309/When_in_Riot_Gear

If it’s selected for printing, I will donate the proceeds to the National Lawyers Guild for OWS defense.

I think that all social apps really strive to put people (and their work) at the center of the product, but very few succeed.

Now we were supposed to come up with a groundbreaking literary anthology representing a cornucopia of online talent, a new scene bursting with originality and genius. Genius? The literary web was two years old. Who exactly were the hot online writers of 1996?

When everything flows through a few company’s servers, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon, and a few others — it’s much easier to shut things down. And it’s also possible to shut things down without anyone knowing. And it’s possible to shut things down with no possible recourse. This is an unacceptably dangerous situation.

[gallery]

(via "Cake Decorations" Wrapping paper | Marian Bantjes)

Clicking the like button 1 billion times will never give you an orgasm or a hug or a high five.

Grab a coffee, sit back and really enjoy one of the most fascinating patent applications to have surfaced in some time.

Under this new deal, pirated movies remain free of charge, free of non-skippable ads, free of five-minute load times, and are now nearly three months ahead of the competition.

At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas.

[gallery]

“As the storm crested, Göran Strand of Östersund, Sweden, took a panoramic photo and wrapped it 360-degrees to create this composition, which he calls Planet Aurora”

Several studies have shown that optimal muscle-tendon efficiency occurs when the muscle stays approximately the same length while the tendon lengthens. When the tendon lengthens, it stores elastic energy and later returns it when the foot pushes off the ground. Tendons are more effective springs than muscles.

Therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller– writer, musician, filmmaker. Being black is like serving as Hoke, the driver in “Driving Miss Daisy,” except it’s a kind of TV series lasts the rest of your life: You get to drive the well-meaning boss to and fro, you love that boss, your lives are stitched together, but only when the boss decides your story intersects with his or her life is your story valid.

[gallery]

“‘It’s hard to stand all day,’ said Zhao Sheng, a plant worker.”

www.youtube.com/watch

(This is the best YouTube video ID I’ve ever seen)

Study finds no biological cause for #Morgellons syndrome. (Joni Mitchell claims to have this.) bit.ly/wauPZY

— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) January 26, 2012

Shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair

Good luck holding out for that Organic Sustainable Craft Underwear for Puppies Shop.

Critics often describe Legend of Zelda games as classic Hero Journeys in the tradition of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey. While it’s easy to find connections here — the call to adventure, supernatural aid, descent to underworld, etc. — I see more resonance in Zelda’s connections to Japanese folklore and, especially, the series’ deep roots in Shintoism.

Long-term there’s no future in printed books. They’ll be like vinyl: pricey and for collectors only. 95% of people will read digitally. Everybody in publishing knows this but most are in denial about it because moving to becoming a digital company means laying off like 40% of our staffs. And the barriers to entry fall, too. We simply don’t want to think about it.

The constant celebration of excess — must we all aspire to twelve kinds of twine? — is more than I can stand.

Are you getting the picture here? If you decide to NOT play on Google+, you will, in essence, be devalued in Google search, at least for the percentage of people who are logged in whilst using Google. This strikes me as wrong.

Why don’t infants signal hunger quietly with spirit fingers or jazz hands?

Three years ago, a TFA recruiter plastered the Fordham campus with flyers that said “Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.” The message of that flyer was “use teaching in high-poverty areas a stepping stone to a career in business.” It was not only profoundly disrespectful to every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it advocated using students in high-poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume-padding” for ambitious young people.

It was all Steve’s stuff, but he was just a year and a half too early.

The things we own are more than ever like props, the clothes we wear like costumes, the places where we live, dine, shop, and vacation like stage sets.

Holy crap this thread is positively SOAKED in White Woman’s Tears.

http://www.latenightwithjimmyfallon.com/assets/video/5-0/swf/DirectWidget.swf?CXNID=1000004.10045NXC&widID=4727a250e66f9723&configXML=http://www.latenightwithjimmyfallon.com/service/videowidget/params/dmlkZW9faWQ9MTM3NjQ5OA==/%3FpageURL%3Dunknown%26referrerURL%3Dunknown

(via http://www.latenightwithjimmyfallon.com/video/questlove-explains-little-brothers-beat/1376498/)

"Scientifically, this is one of the most intricate hip hop songs ever crafted." See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o64jxUjlzYg and I confess I’ve been asleep.

UPDATE not sure why the video’s not working for me. Click through if you can’t watch it here. Questlove’s reverence for J Dilla’s work is vibrant.

Piracy is a special form of stealing committed on the high seas. It involves rolling up to a boat, and taking stuff away from the occupants of the boat. Nobody has ever been killed downloading an authorized copy of a Katy Perry song.

It was awesome to see flying cars, blimps, weird stoplights, people eating noodles outside, and a woman in a fur coat in the rain all within the span of a minute.